2012 – Dirty Picture

Usually I am pretty optimistic about the new year and also full of opinions on what is going to happen in the next year. It ofcourse never turns out that way (for example – I can sadly can’t claim to predict the global financial crisis on the cover of my book)  but since when has that stopped me from stating my opinion. This year-end has been different.  For once I am unable to clearly see what is going to happen (even if it is not going to happen) and even 3 weeks into the new year hasn’t dispelled that smog. The world in my opinion is in that unsettled mood just like how it is before the monsoons start to rain down. Everyone knows it is coming, but don’t when and how much.

In so many ways, 2012 is such an exciting year. It is a year of changes with the US presidential elections, Russian elections, Chinese leadership changes, state elections in India among other things and these are the changes that we know. I already am looking out into what these countries will be like if my favourite (or in some cases the only candidate wins), what will it mean for their neighbours and the world.

But my biggest area of confusion continues to be Europe. I continue to remain confused by the European economic model in its present and suggest future form. Unfortunately, as i live in London half of the news is about Europe and so I can’t even escape it and sometimes it is so bad or pointless that I find myself yearning for some caste equations from UP politics.  Europe (as in EU) is increasingly becoming a beautiful museum with high walls and no one quite gets it.  The governments somehow seem to think that there is a way out of this but even if there is one, there is the orginal demographic time bomb which even Germany can’t fund. How does this beautiful, old continent see itself even 10 years from now? It has already outsourced its defence to the US, most of the manufacturing to China and now it has lost the argument on its welfare model. Its like a rich, well dressed uncle who can’t pay for the extended workforce anymore and is starting to sell his gold cutlery to sustain his lifestyle. There was a time when Europe (apart from US and Japan) was the only game in town and investors had nowhere to go but now they do as other countries get their act together and are on the right side of demography.

My other area of confusion is India and it pertains to the political climate. I am not sure where is the change going to come from. Both the leading parties are what the tea party would call as the Washington type.  They are entrenched in the power politics of Delhi and can’t see life beyond blaming each other. There isn’t sufficient reason for them to change, they are not enough new leaders or new ideas coming through. The non aligned parties are few and mostly confined to the state level. For all my readings of the Delhi politics I don’t see a way out. There is ofcourse the view that I sometimes ignore is that change is incremental and slow and seen from that angle the politics in India is following that slow change route.

But one part that is shining bright is the Chinese economic miracle. Every year, commentators tot out risks to the miracle (ie farmers revolts, middle class revolts, Tibetan revolts etc) and then at the year-end all the newspapers bring forward their projections for when China will overtake the US.  I think I can safely predict that the leadership handover will be smooth, without much fuss and the new leadership will do even more to develop China in a harmonious way.

Harmony is something the world will need this year. Lets please not outsource that to China too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neutrinos in my head

I watching a programme last night on neutrinos making their journey into CERN at a speed faster than light and as those neutrinos pass through the detectors they make little spikes in otherwise flat lines. While the commentators focussed on how this means that we could go back in time my mind was fixated on those little spikes. I wondered if this is how my mind is with spikes in otherwise a flat line and if I don’t catch those spikes and put them down then they disappear. Maybe I can do even better and connect the different spikes and have my own neutrino dawn.  Maybe not !  I don’t need a big expensive particle accelerator to create and catch my neutrinos. They happen in my head all the time, all I need is some time to sit down and think about them it all comes together.

I look at the European financial crisis and high inflation in the middle of a British recession and wonder why hasn’t it come sooner. I look at the economic model of Europe where there is more talk of distributing the pie and less talk about creating the pie and I wonder how can this be sustainable. It was sustainable so far because when the Western world went into a recession the world raw material prices dropped due to a lack of demand which led to low inflation and that helped the economies to get back into growth. But that has all changed now as my countrymen and my Chinese comrades increasingly consume more and more and given finite resources there is continued inflation which puts even more strain on Western consumers struggling with recession. The only way out for these countries is to increase the size of the pie and to reduce what they take from it, this way they will be able to sustain their living standards. We live in a world where relative perceptions are more important than absolutes and as Western consumers see their purchasing power dwindle in developing countries the misery will be even more and will be felt by even those in the Western world who have been spared by the recession.

I look at China as the big player in India’s neighbourhood and I think it is the best thing that has ever happened to 21st century India.  It is forcing India to shed its unique combination of laziness, lack of concern and ignorance. It is almost forcing India’s hand that if it doesn’t ramp up its relationship with its neighbours and even further afield countries like Vietnam , China will get there first if it hasn’t already. Apart from this push factor, there is also a pull factor as these countries need to balance their relationship with China, hedge their bets and get a better deal overall. All in all this means a more globally aware and connected India and I think a big reason for that is China. So in these times of lack of confidence in free market competition, I say competition is good even in the case of international diplomacy.

Which leads me back to neutrinos and the ability to travel back in time.  I wonder why there is this fascination to travel back in time. As it is we don’t read enough of history and where we do, we refuse to take any lessons from it and there is this whole business of recreating/reimagining/reinventing the future as if is was unconnected to our past and present. Or maybe that is why we want to go back in time to recreate the past.

 

 

The politics of it all

I want to build more on the political side of this debate from both sides.  After all this is one of the things that politicians do well , in theory, is politics. Even if it is about being self-serving, which most of them are, they still play a lot of politics. I don’t use the word politics as some bad thing. Far from it, it is the way the government functions and every profession has their own unique game. It could be as simple as understanding how the system works to get their way.

It is clear that to me that the civil society is now increasingly politicised than even 10 years ago. One big step in this direction was the formation of the National Advisory council under UPA-1, which was a collection of leftist and centre-left organisations who got together to debate various social and economic reform policies. Out of the deliberations of the NAC came NREGA and the Right to Education Act.  Working with the government so closely for the first time would have given an insight to some of the political games that gets played and often a well-meaning reform proposal doesn’t translate itself into an act.

I don’t know the organisations behind Team Anna and whether they are the same as in the NAC, but it seems that there are quite a few and they’ve played political cards very well. They’ve been under immense government and media pressure right from the start on their antecedents, their methods and then their ‘unconstitutional’ means.  But they’ve withstood that pressure, spoken to the people directly and side-stepped the government by saying if you don’t agree to our demands we will launch a mass people agitation. The government was left with two choices –  either increase the pressure and hope they will be cracks in team anna and attempt to discredit them or back down and try to claim some credit for the change. As I wrote in my blog earlier, I would have liked to see the government do the latter and take the initiative back from civil society. In the end the government did a bit of both probably because of different factions with the government.

Team Anna it seemed to me came prepared for a long fight.  They had sat through the drafting committee that came about after the first fast and saw how the government muscled them out and was getting its own way.  Theirs was a higher risk strategy which if failed would make them lose momentum and the government would pass its own version of the lokpal bill and claim all credit for it. After all when the parliament is in session, Jantar Mantar is full of all sorts of people who are protesting, fasting, on dharnas; the government pays no attention to them and what would be the guarantee that they would pay attention to Anna.

They were helped by the government who treated them like they would treat the opposition – as in we know your skeletons too and we are both equally in this.  In the case of Team Anna they were no skeletons and the core team are well-respected lawyers and social activists. They are what many of us wanted to be but then said ‘nothing will ever change here’ and moved onto whatever we do now. The government made another blunder by arresting Anna for some flimsy law and order reason on which the team capitalised and said lets remain in jail until the government agrees to our protest demands. So over a few days the protest went up from a few thousands to tens of thousands ! That to me was a brilliant tactical move.

The point I am trying to make here there has been some smart political play, both strategic and tactical, by team Anna. As an observer of politics I have not seen this at the Centre for quite some time. The politics at the Centre has been mostly about carrying political vendetta against the opposition or just ignoring the opposition as if didn’t exist. The back office team got their social media and marketing strategy right and there were able to spread their message and Anna caps everywhere. I can’t remember this happening in India ever as a mass movement at the Centre.

I applaud the commitment of team Anna to reform and holding steadfast to their resolve in the face of immense pressure and I also applaud their political strategists for playing the game so well. A big reason for their success is that people don’t see them hungry for power and hence their moral authority, I want this team to get into politics and fight for elections. Unlike the US where the tea party has to attach itself to the Republicans, the beauty of a multi party democracy is that they can form their own party and fight elections. That to me is the logical next step for this movement.

 

The Anna debate

Watching the debate on the Lokpal bill there are so many thoughts running through my head. There are so many strands in the campaign for this bill and the implications of this campaign and the bill are far reaching.

While the scale and the intensity of the campaign has taken many commentators by surprise, I have been expecting it to come for some time now and I am actually disappointed by the scale and the intensity. The campaign has been mostly run by the middle class in delhi and in some state capitals. It hasnt caught the imagination in the districts and other state capitals and even the media seems to me has been caught a little by surprise and since then has been playing catchup. But the group that has been completely taken by surprise has been the parliament which has gone from trumpeting the , so called, supremacy of the parliament to now agreeing to most of Anna’s demands.

This campaign has been a long time coming in so many different ways. My countrymen have a voiciferous opinion on everything from their neighbours’ sex lives to food to the form of our cricket team. But one thing that doesn’t get voiced enough, in the worlds largest democracy, is the quality of politics and the politicians that represent them in the various state and central bodies. I have had very few frank discussions on our local members of parliament because no one is interested. It was seen as a lost cause. This clearly sat at odds with the otherwise passionate discussions on everything else. That along with the fact the young voters seem completely at odds with a parliament that doesnt seem to represent their interests or even claim to represent their interests. The latter is an important point in politics – the MPs in India couldnt even be bothered to be seen to be representing their entire consituency. To add to the mix, have been the recent spate of corruption scandals and while there was a general feeling among the public at large that something needed to be done, the politicans didnt seem that concerned. Clearly something had to give, I only wonder why has it taken so long and why hasn’t there been an even bigger explosion.

Along with the MPs repeatedly emphasising the supremacy of the parliament, some commentators have also called the means of Anna unconstitutional. In my mind, apart from some tactical errors on behalf of team Anna, this has been a very constitutional campaign. Infact, this campaign has kept the constitution alive from other more firebrand means. Had this campaign not come along at this time, the pressure would have continued to build and from then on it would have been a hope, skip and a jump to an open rebellion. I read one scary commentary comparing the state of affairs to Weimar Germany. If the MPs refuse to listen to what their constituents want, if they refuse to understand the pulse of the nation it is completely allright for someone to go on a fast and demand that MPs take note. Yes going on a fast is a risky move as someone could go on a counter-fast or someone could go on a fast for all the wrong reasons, but that is a risk that the country faces anyway with a weak and aloof parliament. How else between the 5 years does the country make the parliament take note ?

I through this campaign was hoping for a strong competition  between the parliament and team anna for the soul of the average Indian voter.  Once the parliament realised that this is bigger than it earlier thought, they should have taken the initiative as the democratic and rightful representatives of the people and said to team anna we know what our people want because we are listening to them and since we have the power to make the law anyway we don’t need you anymore.  There could have been an open debate about the merits and demerits of the various provisions, the MPs could have started mass contact campaigns or just listended to their consitutents who were sitting with team Anna. As in the MP gets their flock back and regains the initiative, passes the law and takes most of the credit if not all of it. But the Parliament went from denying to complete chaos to now complete surrender and agreeing to all of Anna’s demands.  I am struggling to understand if the Parliament was wrong then and is it right now or both.

This has interesting implications for the future. I for one am very happy that the genie is out of the bottle and I hope that my countrymen do not go back to their day jobs thinking all is well with their country. All is not well and the parliament has been in a limbo for many years now. I look forward to every session of the parliament and look up the major bills for the session and at the end of the session there is nothing to show.  It has now been demonstrated that the Parliament’s hand can be forced without it becoming unconstituional, that the MPs like to show off that they are the new emperors of India but when faced with a strong moral movement they back down completely and shamelessly and that there is now an option to that famous line ‘we are like this only and nothing will ever change’. I hope the Parliament also now understands why is it there and the people for the first time in the history of our democracy have been really empowered.

I feel I am sidestepping another big argument about the merits and demerits of the Lokpal bill. I see that as a small issue for two reasons – one, no bill is perfect as long as the system that produces and governs it is good the output can be changed and two, in the larger scheme of things and overzealous lokpal is hardly going to be the country’s worst problem. The country’s major problem is an ineffective parliament which doesn’t take its role seriously. For me the sight of my countrymen trooping out for a political reason (outside of an election) is the success story which is even bigger than our growth story. I hope this is the beginning of a new India where the politicians are held accountable by the voters.

Jai Hind.

 

The Ramdev business

The pace of politics in India sometimes puts the fast-moving consumer good business to shame. There is always some state election or the other on and outside of the election calendar there are all sorts of political movements shaping up. This is one reason why I find UK politics relatively boring, even though some commentators admirably try to spice it up. If the most exciting development in British politics in years has been the formation of a coalition government then i must continue to satiate my political appetite on Indian affairs. It is not the world’s largest democracy for nothing and as people’s roti, kapda and makan needs are taken care of I think (I hope) my fellow countrymen will find time and an inclination to take to politics. Unfortunately, politics in India is still a mildly dirty word and I hope that will change and politics will been seen as the overarching framework under which governance happens. In this post, I want to write about the recent anti-corruption movements, the result of the state elections, the UPA government coming to its half way point by the end of this year and the various pulls and pressures on the fringes of Indian politics (maoists on the left, and ‘hindutva terrorism’ on the right).

The UPA government’s performance has been at best average. The good bits have been external, defence and home (in that order) and the bad bits have been finance, commerce, telecom, urban and rural development, food and other aam admi ministries. I supported the UPA government and I hoped that in its second term without the Left parties the government would be in a higher gear what with this being the first decade of our demographic dividend. I supported Manmohan Singh as our Prime minister as I saw in him a good combination of academic, foreign affairs and decades of public service. I think this government has mostly disappointed on the domestic front and the country is facing high inflation, slow lack of progress in the social indicators and no progress on other fronts (e.g. – agriculture, rural development and infrastructure). Yes some of these areas are under control of the state, but that doesn’t mean that the central government can not influence the states to do more. So while the government has sufficient majority on the floor of the parliament, inside the government is weak and divided and the floor majority doesn’t give it any incentive to be daring and innovative. The state elections have broadly played in the hands of the Congress. Even the Tamil Nadu elections have strengthened the hands of the Congress, as a weakened DMK may want to stay in the central government and have some influence rather than leave and face the music both at the centre and the state.

This inertia and a continued paralysis in decision-making makes the aam admi angry and it opens up space for other political parties and non-party players. I use the word players to represent a group of people only and not to give them any colour. The political players in the centre who could have taken advantage from the corruption scandals and high inflation situations is the BJP. However, they have a leadership inertia of their own and are probably not to keen of spending all their energy three years before the next general election. It is interesting that the floor advantage in the Parliament makes both the ruling party and the opposition lazy because both somehow assume that nothing will happen in the Centre until the next general election. So lets focus our energy on the state elections and as states go they can have diverse needs. The issues in the three main states that went to elections – TN, WB and Kerela were different. The BJP is ruled by Advani who I now call the Gordon Brown of indian politics. He, like, Gordon thinks that he has the right to be PM after Vajpeyee (Blair). Until that happens he will continue to lead the party into defeat after defeat and snuff out any growth options for the mid level talent. Other players like Nitish Kumar (my favourite), the Left and what remains of the socialists are marginal. So while there is space for political parties in the centre to be a bit more aggressive they have not really occupied that space.

That then leaves the non-party players.  I’ll discuss the peaceful ones here. The non-party players are the various pressure groups of Medha Patkar/Arundhati Roy, Anna Hazare/Baba Ramdev and other RTI, journalists, activists etc. The government very smartly has ensnared some of the good ones into the National Advisory Council which somewhat reduces their credibility for campaigning outside. This is the long argument about changing from within vs change from outside. However, I want to focus on the Hazare and Ramdev phenomenon. These people have been allowed more space for two reasons – one, as discussed above, lacklustre performance of the opposition parties, and two the government didn’t quite see it coming. I think the government was too focussed on the neutralising the parliamentary opposition that it underestimated the ability of these players to tap into the public mood and ask serious governance related questions. These players also managed the media quite well. I often say that the level of the scandals is nothing new, what is new is that people’s perceptions have changed and the political parties have been slow to grasp that issue. The political parties also feel threatened by the support of non-party players as inherent in that support is the message that the voters trust these people more than their elected representatives. An excellent analysis of the Ramdev spectacle is here.

The government has a couple of options ahead – take the bull by its horns and accept that there is corruption (but at lower and isolated levels) and that it will weed it out and that will take the wind away from the Ramdevs of the world. Another option, is to deny it all or call it subjudice and that will drive the people more to Ramdev. Or the third option, is to discredit Ramdev and Hazare and talk about the supremacy of the parliament. Unfortunately, it is a combination of second and third option that is being used at the moment and that doesn’t serve the government well at all. It gives more credit to Ramdev than he deserves and gives the government a  bigger mountain to climb. Instead, the MPs who talk about the supremacy of the parliament should be holding these mass contact programs to ascertain the pulse of the people. Maybe this is how it always happens in the middle of the term with the government half bored and the opposition keeping its powder dry till it gets closer to the general election and that gives space to these non-party players.

What will also be interesting is how do Ramdev and Hazare take this forward. Do they stop at the non-corruption bill or do they go onto other things and maybe even form a political party. I for one want these people to form a political parties. The political scene in India is in need of fresh ideas and the voters need a broader choice and i always need new ideas to chew upon.

 

Pakistan – now or never

As I look back at the events of the last week the title of this post, which takes its name from the Reuters blog on Pakistan, comes to mind again and again. When Osama was killed last week my first thoughts were very cynical on what this will achieve and where does Pakistan and the world go from here. Having had a week of reflection and as I watch Gillani make a speech to the Pakistani parliament, I am still mildly cynical and even more worried about the state of affairs of Pakistan.

It is clear to me that Osama and to an extent Al-Qaeda is one of the last remaining legacies of the cold war. This was a time when all sorts of actions were condoned in the name of fighting communism and as long the Soviets were kept at bay everything seemed justified. Which is not to say that the Soviets were holy cows. They weren’t, but they also paid the price by seeing a most spectacular disintegration of their country and a fall from grace from the top table of two to one of the top 10 countries in the world. They now sit on the same table with other emerging powers of which two (India and China) used to Soviet aid.

The Americans on the other hand emerged victorious and got away lightly in comparison and they haven’t really had to account for their activates in Afghanistan among other things. It also helps that the American voters have at best a short term memory on foreign affairs and at worst don’t care at all. I say this because the American voters are the only group that can keep the American government accountable in its unipolar world and if the voters don’t care or don’t know then the world lives on the mercy of the US president. It becomes easy for the US president to sway his electorate while the world has little control over him and yet bears sometimes a disproportionate impact of US actions. So Osama is seen in context of 9/11 but no one talks about his role in throwing the Soviets out and the role of the Americans in funding him and of the Saudis and Pakistanis in nurturing him. Someone like Osama shouldn’t have been created and when created, shouldn’t have been left to fester in the post-Soviet Taliban government.

Yes he has now been killed, but only after he has been allowed to do the damage over these many years and the US continues to fight a full fledged resistance in Afghanistan. The killing themselves has come at an additional cost and also some potential benefits. The cost and benefits are mostly cantered around Pakistan.

There are conflicting reports on how the US was allowed to get into mainland Pakistan. Some say that the Pakistani radars were jammed by the US military, the other say that the army can not afford to have its radars running 24 hours on its western front due to maintenance costs and some others say that Pakistani jets had the US helicopters in their sights but were asked to abort at the last minute. Either ways it reflects a sorry state of affairs of the army which has been the pride and joy of Pakistan and gives that nation a sense of respectability on the outside when it is increasingly hollowing out inside. The fact that it happened next to the army cantonment only adds to their misery. It is like in his death, Osama has given a one last kick to his former masters.

The killing was also done inside a sovereign country. I am not an expert on international law, but this doesn’t sounds to me an Afghanistan, Libya or even an Iraq. This is ostensibly an ally in the war on terror and has been for some decades now ! While I find it difficult to find fault in America’s actions, except perhaps taking Osama alive, I think there is a cost to this operation. There is always a cost, and in this case it will play out in the years to come. To my mind this cost can take various forms – it can be that the government in Pakistan collapses and the army which has already been discredited disintegrates and takes sides between the jihadis and the liberals. It could be that the Pakistani government is driven more into the hands of China (note its statement in the support of Pakistan) and cedes more land and more control to it. The cost could also be in American assets and it may also prolong the war in Afghanistan.

There can also be some benefits as the civil society in Pakistan may finally muster up the courage to take on the army and intelligence services. I doubt this will happen now when it didn’t happen post-Bangladesh war or post AQ Khan, but if it does then it will be good unintended benefit of the operation. This has been said many times before and I’ll say it again – Pakistan again stands at a crossroad and I hope for its sake and for the sake of the rest of the world it takes the right path to becoming a progressive, modern nation.

Will it take the right path that I want it to take ? I don’t think so. The vested interests (including the politicians and the army) run too deep and they may again strike a deal to keep themselves in power in the name of stability. Although it may also take the middle path of doing a bit of both.

 

Tell me why

It is almost the end of another year. I think I have just enough time to squeeze in another post. I ended my last post wishing for a crystal ball and a cheat sheet to decipher the ways of our world. Santa did get me that crystal ball and I have been busy peering into it. If only. But I have used 2010 to good purpose to think up some more questions and confusions. Here are some :

I have finally concluded this year that I don’t understand the business of religion. I don’t understand how human beings who are otherwise have exactly the same physical characteristics, who more or less go about their lives in similar ways follow different religions. More importantly in a world where we have lots of choices and increasingly fickle preferences we somehow stick to the same religion and we don’t innovate between religions. We hardly ever seem to change religions, we don’t combine them to form new ones and somehow we find existing religions sacrosanct. We constantly berate people who order us to do stuff, we disagree with our parents, elders, old people all the time and yet we seem to accept something that has been written or said many centuries ago as sacrosanct. Why is religion above everything else ? And why are religions different even though we inherently seem to be one human race ?

 Everytime I want to disgust myself, I go to the Iraq body count website. the news recently said that, the deaths in 2010 have been less than in 2009 and that was being presented as a sign of progress. From the website, it seems to me that more than a 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion. I don’t understand how is that allowable in our world. Everytime a US or a NATO soldier dies there is an elaborate mourning and a lot of soul-searching if there is any need for the military mission to continue. And yet all these Iraqis have died almost unmourned and supposedly it is them who were going to be saved from their evil democratically elected leader. They don’t seem to have any voice in the powers that rule their country militarily as those powers are only answerable to their voting public. So while the Iraqis live in the mercy of these democratic powers who are there to promote democracy and rule of law in their country, they are kept outside the democratic process of their rulers. The only process they have access to, that too belatedly, is of their own country which really doesn’t have a leg to stand up to Western powers. So until Iraq gets its act together the civilians are really going to have to fend for themselves and if some of them die then some obscure website tracks them in the hope that someone will take attention.

I have been fascinated with the rise of the e-book readers, although I am petrified about the thought of not being able to hold a book to read or not being able to see any available table space piled with books. But as I have aspirations to be a world leader, I don’t like to talk about my personal distress. So the world saving bit is – why is it that no one has thought about linking different books together. Why is it that so much of knowledge remains locked in books and is inaccessible to the average punter on the internet and while all the crap on the internet is very accessible. Why is it that if I am reading a book with references, I am unable to look up those references or to go to other books that may talk about similar stuff, but on the internet I am able to click on every inane unrelated advertisement that google decides to show me. Why is it that Wikipedia is so widely available while the information of all the books is locked down and inaccessible ?

I end with a wish. May 2011 bring even more questions and fewer answers so I can look forward to 2012. Happy new year.

 

Kowtow

The word kowtow is an interesting one. It was used to describe the act of bowing to the Chinese emperor which the British refused to do in the Chinese imperial court as this would mean submission to the emperor. Those were ofcourse the heady days of the British colonial empire. These days the British foreign office is having to dust off the ‘art of kowtowing’ manuals and educate its prime minister on the art of bowing ever so slightly more on foreign visits.  So while the ground situation in China and India has not changed ( in terms of Kashmir, Tibet and human rights) the British government seems to take a more benign view of things and in the case of India decides to lecture Pakistan on terrorism. Is Pakistan really doing more terrorism than it was in the mid – 90s? Not really, but India has changed and Britain has discovered the art of kowtow. Britain has had good practice in this for the past decades, as the Wikileaks reveal, in kowtowing to the US and has been paranoid about whether it has been kowtowing enough and properly.

But this post is not about Britian’s kowtow, but more about India and China’s relationship. I have been wanting to write this for some time and atleast before Grandpa Wen made his way to India, but I didn’t, and as things stand now I have no way of claiming that I predicted correctly what will happen in his trip ! For me India- China relations are the most exciting part of India’s foreign policy and one with an immense amount of untapped potential. I expect India’s relations with the other big players in the India foreign policy radar to follow a familiar path. In the case of relationship with the established powers (India, EU, Japan etc) , it will be a case of them wanting to play a part in India’s rise and a generally peaceful and predictable rise of India vis-a-vis these powers. The relationship with Pakistan could either go the North vs South Korea way with Pakistan being reduced to throwing its toys out of its pram ( I mean sabre rattling) every so often and becoming an inconvenience to India because by doing that it means that Pakistan doesn’t have to focus at its internal problems, or it could go the way of East vs West Germany without the unification bit.However, it is the relationship with China that may not follow any known path.

The relationship with China is a very interesting one. China’s chosen path poses a question that I had thought had been answered when the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. The question was about democracy/freedom vs totalitarian state and capitalism vs communist economy. But as it turns out only half the question was answered i.e. that there is no place in the modern world for a communist economy. However, it seems from the case of China that there is space for a totalitarian state with a capitalist economy. India on the other hand offers a broadly free state with an economy that is increasingly become capitalist from its earlier mixed(confused) origins. Both the countries hold the destinies of a billion odd people in their hands and both are in a unique phase in their demography, which means it is almost a now or never couple of decades in front of them. If either of them fail now, they will not be able to achieve the best that a country of that size and inheritance could ideally achieve.  And I believe that it is in the next three decades as both these countries try to create employment for the millions who enter the workforce every year, create a better life for people who are already working, ensure that the newborn are well fed and the old are cared for , this question of freedom/democracy vs a single party regime will be answered. That question aside, there is a lot in common between India and China. Both countries have a rich heritage and for some reason (both foreign and self-imposed) have been away from the world’s top table for many centuries. They both now see a glimpse of what their world can be if they get their act together and if they as a billion people want something, there isn’t much in the world that can oppose it. Perversely, both are the world’s leading practitioners in female infanticide and feticide !

So when Grandpa Wen made his way to India, I wasn’t expecting much movement outside of trade. On the business of trade, the Chinese are the easiest and they know that their country has a proposition like no other – a manufacturing powerhouse based on  low-cost, high volume, supply chain and trade links and an increasingly affluent middle class which is a couple of countries in its own right. The world takes notice when China starts trade in yuan bonds (dim sum market). Most countries are an either or and hardly ever both. It is this that lets them get away with keeping parts of their economy off-limits for foreign business and keeping the yuan devalued.  On the other stuff like finalising border issues, stapled visa to Kashmiris, India’s status in the security council etc, I wasn’t expecting much because I don’t see any value to the Chinese in doing all this.  While the US cultivates India media and atleast one newspaper sounds like an extension of American foreign policy, Grandpa Wen actually admonished the Indian press on his way out for stoking up tensions in India – China relationship. And this is why I say that this is going to be a relationship like no other and the most challenging for India’s foreign policy.

To me of all the P-5 who visited India this year, this one was the most interesting of them all and also the most confusing about the shape it will take in the future. I end this year with my question and my long standing unfulfilled wish for a crystal ball and a cheat sheet to connect all the dots around me.

 

Uncommon wealth

The ongoing commonwealth games in Delhi have raised all sorts of questions in my head for which my traditional paradigms (if i may call them that) which usually suffice for most India related questions. It helps me deal with my own questions and confusions, helps me give sensible answers to people around me who don’t know India as well and also puts into perspective news that comes out of India. I have 2 main theories on India which by themselves are based on other theories and facts, they are:

- Corruption is part and parcel of India. It is the norm rather than the exception. Yes it maybe be becoming less of a norm than what it was 10 years ago, but that has been too slow and it still is the norm. If you are doing business in India then you just add the cost of corruption to your cost of business and even inspite of that doing business in India is a profitable venture. Yes this goes against all the wonderful bribery and money laundering laws in the western world but hey, who are we kidding here ? But there is sincerity among thieves and once you pay up the work gets done or the money gets returned. Remember Lakhubhai Pathak accusing Narasimha Rao for taking money in turn for giving him business in India ? He didn’t question why he had to give the money, but he was more upset that even after paying the money nothing got done. That broke the code.

- India is not a superpower and it wont be one for the next 20 -30 years. This is as per most acceptable definitions of a superpower which are based on financial, economic, social and quality of life. The fact that millions of people can talk about yoga, laughing clubs and have a wonderfully spiritualistic way of life does not make her a superpower. The question that we Indians should be asking ourselves is, do we want to be a superpower and what kind of superpower do we want to be ? But that is a different question for another time. Yes we have come a long way in the past two decades but we have some more decades to go and I have no doubt that we will get to wherever it is that we want to get to. I say it often and I’ll say it again, that if a billion people want something then they usually get it. But I recognise that we are not there yet and I have no pretensions that I come from a developing country (or whatever they are called these days!).

So with these two theoretical frameworks in my head I was reasonably confident that a lot of money will exchange hands (corruption paradigm) and there will be a few co-ordination problems (superpower paradigm) but we will get there in the end. What i didn’t factor in was the fact there is thing called 24 hour news channels who constantly need something to fill their agenda and they will blow my corruption idea into pieces. Why after all this money was given and taken did the work still not match upto the quality and was not delivered on time? Why even if the budget has been blown to pieces did things not happen on time ? So if corruption is incapable of delivering the goods then what is next ? I like, as Lakhubhai Pathak would have been, was upset although not quite out of pocket as him. I was more upset that it broke my beautiful theory into pieces and here was something happening in India that I could not relate to.

My second paradigm was more helpful and made up for the lack of the first one. It is a relative one and a clever one and can be adjusted to take into account mid-course problems. So if a mishap happens on the road of India being a superpower, I just put the clock back and add some years to India getting there and telling myself that I have a longer journey to enjoy or grimace. But then when something as wonderful as the Delhi metro or the airport happens on time and on budget the clock comes forward. Maybe I should start an India version of the doomsday clock.

But I wont be doing my India any justice if I don’t turn around and ask – what is the purpose of the Commonwealth anyway ? what does it do or not do ? the Queen hardly has any serious role in the UK, what role does she have in the foreign countries. And what is India doing in the commonwealth ? On its website, the Commonwealth has some airy-fairy principles of human rights, democracy and world peace. Even my friend Gadaffi swears by those rules and my favourite democratically elected leader (now sadly dead) on a weak moment would have admitted a soft spot these really high values. I don’t see any references to clean toilets in their objectives. Even the commonwealth flag looks suspiciously like theWorld Bank logo !

Watching the beautiful opening ceremony, I was struck by the number of nations in the march past and the chest of the BBC commentators swelling in pride as they talked about every little former colony and I think it dawned to me that this is really an exercise to remind the current generation in Britain that the British empire wasn’t a creation of the Victorian fiction writers but was actually real. And which is why the British media are so sensitive, rightly or wrongly, at any failings in the lead up to the games.

Never mind if the so-called Commonwealth values are abused over and over again but keep the toilets clean and the games ticking along.

 

 

The case for a mosque

I am usually an impartial observer to debates which involve religion. My only contribution to the debate is usually to say that we have all come from the same place and we will all end up in the same place. What you call that place and how you think you will get there depends on your religious beliefs or lack of them. But this debate on the mosque has me very interested and I want to write about it.

Before I moved to London my idea of a mosque was of an old beautiful building, preferably 3-4 centuries old, with beautiful minarets and a muzzein with a voice like heaven calling for prayer. The mosque is surrounded by markets, restaurants, shops that have been there forever and there is always a clamour of people around it. The mosque is a living, breathing space and people even use it as a thoroughfare from one side of the market to another. The one mosque in East london that I went to is a nondescript building with some architecture outside which makes it sort of look like a mosque. Inside it can be any other building, but instead of rooms and cubicles, it has big halls and spaces for people to pray.Very boring and uninspiring.

I don’t know what is America’s , or some Americans’, problem to the mosque/memorial centre on Ground zero. The first time I heard of this some months ago, it made perfect sense. Muslims around the world are often asked to stand up to their more extremist counterparts. In turn , their extremist counterparts tell them that they are not Muslim enough. So here are Muslims in NY/US coming up with an original idea which shows to the world that their faith doesn’t condone the nonsense that gets perpetrated in the name of Islam and they show to the extremists within them that they are as Muslim as anyone else because they are building mosques. But then if only everything that happened made sense and vice versa. If that was the case, then my favourite democratically elected leader, Saddam Hussein, would have still been alive. In these times of economic recession, it is very important to have an economic edge to one’s argument. So here is my case – America spends billions of dollars in aid towards winning hearts and minds of Muslim populations worldwide. Here is a low cost alternative of winning the hearts and minds and putting a picture of this mosque on every USAID handout in a Muslim country.

But will it happen ? my guess is no. Obama has lost enough political capital on the healthcare bill and the economy is marching towards a double dip, the last thing he wants to do is push for building a mosque on Ground Zero. So no boring, minaret less, muzzeinless, office style mosque on Ground Zero. Is that a good thing or a bad thing ?

 

Land of the pure

The news about Pakistan in the past couple of months has gone from bad to worse and just when I think this is the bottom, the country manages to find a new bottom. But in many ways the problems are only a manifestation of what’s been visible for some time now and the natural disasters and self-goals have only exacerbated the underlying problems. Bit like India’s 1991 economic crisis wasn’t really invented in 1991 even though it came to fore in 1991.

It must be hard for Pakistan to live next to India and try to compete with as an equal. It must be difficult to counter the moral high ground that India occupies and its claim on everything from spiritualism to non violence to secularism. If that wasn’t bad, then India is now on its way to becoming an economic and defence superpower and that India is looking to connect all these three to achieve its foreign policy goals. So if you aren’t the spiritual type then maybe you are a businessman or a defence contractor. These are so big that the world now pretends to ignore Kashmir although the same level of violence even 10 years ago would have got a sharp message from the US. Even worse for Pakistan is that it is being increasingly ignored, both the US and India have a bigger fish to fry and that is China. It is China that is the focus of a lot of India’s energies and the US would love to see India becomes it sidekick in Asia and take on China. So when Obama and Manmohan meet later this year they are probably devoting much less time to Pakistan than their predecessors did even 10 years ago.

The urdu press in Pakistan is full of verbal barrage against the government. They want the government to stand up against the US, Israel and India combine. They see China and other Muslim countries in the middle east as their allies. They see India’s hand in flooding of Pakistan and they don’t want to accept the $5 million from the Hindu moneylenders. But no one really gets it, it and if they do get it then they don’t say it, that there is no one in the country that can govern the country out of trouble. Yet, the country has a mini – superpower ambitions and wants to be on the high table on everything from Afghanistan to the Security council expansion and wants to compete with its ever-growing neighbour. That creates a serious expectation- reality gap.

It is hard not to feel sorry for this proud country now going down on its knees. It has been sold over and over again by its leaders first to the US and now slowly being resold to China simply because they refuse to govern and work for the betterment of their countrymen. Everyone who can, gets out and makes as much money however they can manage. Whether they are cricketers, NGOs working in disaster relief or the President himself dropping by his French château, everyone has their own pockets to fill while the country slowly descends into further mess.The country seems to vacillate between self-serving army men and corrupt politicians.

There is talk of a revolution, but the talk is from the same people who don’t want a real revolution. The people who should be really revolting are busy getting themselves to dry land and ensuring their families are fed.

 

Sonarbangla

Sitting in my plush hotel room in Dhaka I am looking out as the monsoon rain pours down into the blue swimming pool below and into this dirty pond further ahead.  The pool has kids taking swimming lessons and the pond has people washing clothes on the edges and some even swimming in it. I have a million thoughts running through my head and if I have to pick out one then it has to be the one on Bangladesh.

I have returned to this country after seven years and in the meanwhile I think I have written atleast a couple of times about it. It is hard not to feel sorry for the cards that history has dealt to the country. Post independence it went from British dominance to dominance from Pakistan and only managed to get out by 1971. The country is surrounded on 2.5 half  sides by India. Even by Indian standards of economic development, the regions surrounding Bangladesh are not exactly economic powerhouses. The 0.5 side is Myanmar which is even worse. The fourth side is the Bay of Bengal which is how the British got here and even that is not the most exciting bits of the Indian ocean. Nothing happens there, there isn’t much cross shipping and India controls the southern bit of the sea around the Andaman islands.  For most of the past few decades the two begums of Bangladeshi politics have sustained a personal feud against each other while the country has floundered. The only thing that can be said in its favour is the rich Indo-Gangetic delta and a young population which is eager to get somewhere. It in many ways epitomizes both the worst bits of the subcontinent and also is a symbol of its hopes.

But something interesting happened last week. The Indian finance minister was in town to sign a $1billion dollar line of credit with the government of Bangladesh for infrastructure projects which will also include building of road networks to connect India to its north-east regions and to connect Bangladesh to Nepal and Bhutan via India. In the Indian scheme of things, this is the largest line of credit offered to any country and I cannot think of a better case than Bangladesh. In the Bangladesh  scheme of things this isn’t much.  It gets about $2billion of foreign aid each year, while this $1billion will be spread over a couple of years and is a commercial loan with an interest element.

But as I start to dust off my old arguments against foreign aid  I start to wonder how much that $2billion actually stays in Bangladesh, how much is in its list of priorities ( and not the donor priorities), how much is about reinventing the wheel (rather than working with the existing system) and how much of it goes beyond the well-heeled bits to the needy bits.  To this I add my more recently gained arguments about international trade, about local companies being promoted, the sustainability factor and capacity building. I also wonder whether a country would rather be in a position to receive a loan or free foreign aid. A loan indicates its credit worthiness, that the lender expects to receive a rate of return higher than the rate of interest. The lendee also has a stake in it as it wants to prove its credit worthiness and wants repay the loan and the interest.

Ofcourse, there is a political element involved in all this. India wants to support the Sheikh Hasina government, it wants the cheapest access to its north-eastern areas, develop Bangladesh as a reliable partner in the subcontinent, counter Chinese influence in the region and also give its private sector access into the Bangladeshi market. I don’t have a problem with this and I think India should go even further and give Bangladeshi goods and investment from Bangladesh, preferential access to the Indian market. Why not even go further and look at passport free travel like it is in the case with Nepal.

 

The new special relationship

David Cameron last week completed a two-day trip to India along with half his cabinet. I spent some time reading about the trip both in the British and Indian media and for once I sort of understood what both sides were talking about. While on the face of it there hasn’t been much visible output from the trip, not that anyone was expecting anything substantial, I want to talk about the status of India- British relations and related factors.

How does Britain see India in 2010? Stripped off the old adages of the Raj,  the world’s largest democracy and the diaspora, the answer is that it sees very little of it. This is mostly because India does not figure at all (or very little) into the mindset of the British public. There see Indians and Indian food everywhere but not much thought goes into India as a country. What is the country about ? and what language do they speak apart from Indian and what are the other states in India apart from ‘ the punjab’ ? how many british tourists anaylse the merits of travelling to ladakh versus kerela as they analyse the merits of the various greek islands? The two other things that capture the imagination are economy and sports. No Indian presence in sports apart from cricket which is not the top sport here and hardly any other Indian presence in international sports from a long distance.There is an increasing presence in economic terms, but still marginal. India is a biggish blip, but still only a blip.

But Cameron seems something else and he has made big talk about his trip to India and I am not sure what exactly is going on here. He has made the trip early on his term and carried a heavyweight cabinet with him. Also went with him went a heavyweight team of journalists. From the BBC went the chief political correspondent of BBC News and the Economics editors among others. This sort of entourage usually goes for EU, G8 type meetings. From their reporting and some of the interviews with the British cabinet it almost seems like a fact finding/getting to know India trip. This seemed to be about lets see how best we can work with India  and gather as much information and contacts, rather than let’s go make an impact and sign lots of agreements. If this is indeed the case then I am half disappointed. The British government has always claimed that it maintains ‘close’ relations with India and if half of the cabinet are going to catch up with the Indian economy then clearly someone dozed off for a decade or so and woke up to find a G8 on its last legs. I am also half happy, that someone did wake up and decided that they need to catch up with the new India. I guess how successful the trip has been will be more clear in the next year or two.

The other interesting thing about the trip was Cameron’s comments on Pakistan. I was sort of expecting a big political statement from him and I wrote in my last blog that it maybe about the Security council expansion. Instead, it turned out to be a statement to Pakistan on cross border terrorism. Without going to the merits of the statement, this causes Pakistan a loss of face as it was delivered from Indian soil by a British PM. Some influential Pakistanis, who have a slightly deluded view of Britain’s place in the scheme of things, expect Britain to force India to mediate with Pakistan on Kashmir. This was the sort of statements that India used to get from Britain not too far back. But now as both India is economically stronger and Britain is stagnating economically these statements are now delivered to Pakistan as a way of appeasing India. These have nothing to do with the facts on the ground have remained more or less the same since the 90s.

Cameron talked about a new special relationship. I think he needs to do more convincing both to his voters here and to Indians why is this relationship the new special one, why India and why now ?

 

Sitting in the sun

Sitting on a sunny Crete beach some days ago all sorts of thoughts were going through my head.  It was probably because I was trying to read three books and two magazines simultaneously and failing miserably. I was thinking about how my dreams in the night were a strange concoction of the various readings. So an article comparing Merkel and Sarkozy different styles of functioning, in my dream, became a steamy romance between them in Venice. Another interesting one was that the Mahabharata holds clues for the recent economic crisis. In my dreams I was trying to be like Theodore Zeldin in making connections between different manifestations and  while his connections are brilliant, mine are at best funny. But that has never stopped me from making them.

I was also thinking about the World Cup. This was probably the first time that I was trying to understand the off field happenings. In the Portugal vs North Korea game, I was struck with what the North Korean manager was wearing which was an oversized coat. While other managers were either in a jacket or sport wear, all this one could afford was this coat. I was wondering if the North korean players got to see any television, if they discovered a world which is doing much better than them. On the same note, the differences in kits between the smaller teams (poorer) and the bigger ones (richer) teams was not that obvious as it would have been even 12 years ago.  I was also trying hard not to think about the Dutch and their miserable world cup. I have been happier with their previous earlier round exits than their performance in the finals.

I was also thinking about the India-Pakistan talks. I was wondering if the increased violence is in Kashmir around the same time is too much a coincidence and if it is one then is it a sinister one (cross border support) or a more benign one (stone throwers getting more organised). I have come back slightly disappointed to learn that the talks ended in more disagreement than agreement. As always the real issues on why the talks failed will never be known for sure. I am also unsure if Krishna is really the right person to be handling this.

As India grows her fears and doomsday scenarios are also growing. One of them that security experts like to talk a lot about is the Chinese ‘string of pearls’ strategy where the Chinese are involved in infrastructure projects in ports in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Karachi and thus potentially gives them the access and the ability to choke Indian peninsula. This is a classic Indian fear scenario. India has mostly ignored its neighbours and when China starts to build infrastructure in these countries, Indians complain of Chinese encirclement. If only this is probing India to get her act together with her neighbours. This is exactly Pakistan’s problem with India in Afghanistan and China’s problem with US naval presence in the Indian ocean and in other bases in its vicinity. While the US encircles everyone, inside that everyone play their little games of upmanship.

More interestingly, next week the British PM and three senior cabinet ministers (i.e. foreign, finance and business) among others leave on a trip to India. This follows the speech by the foreign secretary signalling a change in British foreign policy away from ethics to economics. This government probably has the last chance to have an independent strategic relationship with India. It’s a last chance this shared relationship with India is fast dwindling with India’s young population who see a more direct relationship with the US than with the British. There are other mid-level countries/regional blocs trying to do a strategic relationship with India and UK runs the risk of being one of the many. I am curious that this trip has come so early in this government and I am interested to see what is this new relationship is going to look like.

I think I already know Cameron’s answer to the Kashmir question at the press conference but I am keen to know the answer to the Security Council expansion question.

 

Who should I support in the World Cup ?

The FT publishes a weekly Dear Economist column, where the reader’s burning questions from relationships to politics are answered using the tools of Adam Smith. Questions are answered by Tim Harford and I look forward all week to the witty questions and even better answers.

I thought my burning question from the last post needed no less a brain to answer and he did answer:

Question – I am an Indian but my country never qualifies for the World Cup. I usually support the Netherlands because I am a fan of Dutch football. But this year is different, because I work in England, pay my taxes here and feel that if England wins the World Cup it will lead to positive externalities for me. My boss may go easy on me, the general mood of the country will lift and even the looming spending cuts may feel more bearable. But should I sacrifice my love of Dutch football for the sake of my stake in the British economy?

Deepan Banati, London

Answer -

Dear Deepan,

I am glad to see you are taking the beautiful game seriously, but puzzled that you are so determined to impale yourself upon the horns of an imaginary dilemma. You seem to think that supporting England and supporting the Netherlands are substitutes with sharply decreasing returns – in other words, you can only afford to support one or the other. I do not really understand why this should be true.

Until the two teams actually meet, you can support both. This has many merits. You have a real interest in twice as many matches, for example, and are more likely to have some wins to celebrate. If the teams do meet, the situation will be slightly more difficult. But this cannot happen until the semi-finals at the earliest. And it may not happen at all: neither England nor the Netherlands are exactly permanent fixtures in the World Cup’s last four.

In the unlikely event that your divided loyalties are tested, find a Dutch pub and cheer the Dutch with abandon. At work the next day, resume the demeanour of an England fan, whether celebrating victory or heroic failure in a penalty shoot-out.

Economists always assume that people may hide their true preferences; this is one assumption to which you should adhere.

And so I shall stop impaling myself on the horns of an ‘imaginary dilemma’ and support both the teams.  Come on England  ! and Come on Oranje !! Hopefully you will never meet in the tournament.

 

The Game

When I first started to blog I don’t think I ever imagined that one day I will be writing about football. But at that time I also thought that I wont get a month of writing and so it goes. The World cup kicked off today and to me this world cup should be no different from any others, except for the fact that the matches are at more sensible times. But already there are so many things that are different about this world cup.These differences make the world cup closer and I feel like I have a bigger stake in the game than at anytime before.

This time the game is in Africa rather than in some boring european nation where everything goes like clockwork and nothing can ever go wrong. This time it is in South Africa and just like in China for last year’s Olympics, South Africa has been subject to intense scrutiny on its democracy, post apartheid integration, economy and politics. The scrutiny is intense and not surprisingly they manage to show up some chinks. From all accounts it seems to be an open developing country trying to become a model for Africa and trying to host a football competition. There is criticism that the stadiums won’t be full, they wont get used after the competition, of the income inequalities and even the fact that Mugabe is coming in his capacity as an African head of state. All this because the country wants to hold a World cup competition ?

The country that I now live in is a bit football mad. All year, there are these intense football leagues with matches  every week and intense club rivalries. The premier football league features the some of the top players of the world. For the past couple of weeks a countdown has begun to the World cup, more so because the fans think England have a better chance than the past couple of world cups, although not too many are willing to admit it yet. At work I receive emails which somehow manage to bring the World cup into serious emails and I have entered into two world cup related competitions – one a simple one where you get to do a lucky dip and pick out a team and I got Paraguay (!) and the other where you have to predict scores in the first round and winners from then on. It doesn’t help that there are television screens all around and world cup schedules stuck everywhere. More and more I watch international football, I realise that this is the sport of a globalising world. It easily transcends boundaries , most countries around the world (albeit not as well as some others) and is probably the only sport that attracts international business types. So many different languages, colours, playing styles and all of them come together.

I am also in bit of a quandary this world cup. I usually support the Dutch team, since India never qualifies for the world cup. But this time it is different since I live and work in England. I feel that if England wins it will lead to some positive externalities for me. So should I give up my love for Dutch football for my stake in the British economy ? Coming soon (hopefully) is the answer to this question using the tools of adam smith.

 

Turkish delight

I have always admired politicians for their multi faceted skills. I always wonder how are they able to speak sense on any topic under the sun for however long they are allowed to speak.  But one thing that I don’t see too many politicians do is to make connections. They sometimes make connections when it suits them and they make inconvenient connections. Like somehow we live in a world that is economically connected but that connection seems to go nowhere else. It doesn’t lend itself to immigration, religion and politics. I have always wanted political types to not look at issues in absolute but look at interconnected things and deal with those issues accordingly.So when Robert Gates suggested that it was EUs reluctance to admit Turkey as a member that was pushing it eastwards. I was pleasantly surprised. Here is a politician in government making a wonderful connection that most know but very few admit. I am not sure when this comment was made, but seen in the light of the Security Council vote it is partly convenient and partly pertinent.

It is convenient because it is always easy to blame it on someone else, even if these are your European allies, and it is easier to blame it on EU which, lets face it, is not going through it finest hour. It is also convenient because Gates probably makes some other connections which are not so comfortable to voice. One of them is the Afghanistan. Somehow the history of the current problem seems to start when the Taliban overthrew the Russian sponsored government and occupied Kabul. No one talks about the American share of the mess and how in front of the Cold War everything else seemed trivial. It is pertinent because I haven’t heard one logical reason why Turkey should not be in the EU. While I have heard lots of illogical reasons why Turkey shouldn’t be in the EU, including one from its president. The process seems to be deliberately stalled because EU doesn’t want to say no and it is just waiting for Turkey to either slip up or say that the wait is not worth it even more.

I don’t know what to make of the vote. I don’t know why Russia and China voted for it, even though they were staunchly opposing it till last year. Did the US cede ground over N.Korea to China and over E. Europe to  Russia  ? More importantly where are Turkey and Brazil going with this opposition. With all the five permanent members of the security council showing a rare unity and voting for the sanctions, I am not sure how far can Turkey or Russia go with this. Is it really possible to a nuclear deal with Iran without including one or more permanent members of the security council ?

 

Son of a preacher man

Coming back from a meeting at work I found my colleagues huddled around one of the televisions. It was Gordon Brown making his speech that he will leave resign soon. He looked tired and drained out and didn’t seem too pleased that his political career was coming to an end. From the TV debates a couple of weeks ago it seemed to me that he felt he had much more to contribute to British politics, Europe and to the world. Once the elections result came out, it was only a matter of time before he announced his elections. Even then I was disappointed and felt like it is the end of an era. Inspite of all his failings, I don’t think any of the current crop of wannabe prime ministers match to his experience and his level of seriousness. He is more of the pre-TV debate stock of leaders and like someone said that he has a ‘radio face’. It’s still all to play for the next government and Nick Clegg has had the hardest political decision of his life so far. If he goes for Labour then it risks being called the ‘salon de refuses’ and the progressives could see themselves voted out for a generation, if he goes for Labour then he risks losing his core constituency not to forget the left leaning papers who back him. He could decide not to support anyone and face opposition from both sides.

The interesting questions are – who will form the next government ? what will be the main planks of the coalition ( on economy, election reforms, education and EU) ? how long will it last? and who will get the most out of it (one or both the coalition partners or the opposition) ?

Its been hard for me not to be distracted by the issue of the Pakistani American , American Pakistani, trying to plant a bomb in Times Square. What was even more interesting was Hillary Clinton’s threat about ‘consequences’ if such an attack was to be traced back to Pakistan. I am not sure what is she threatening here. What exactly will the US do if the attack was indeed traced back to Pakistan ?  Impose economic sanctions on one of its largest aid recipients ? What do the tea party goers make of the fact that billions of their taxes are going to Pakistan as aid ? It is hard for me not to feel sorry for Pakistanis here. Millions of them live in a country where the government only seems to have 3 ministries (foreign, defence and interior) , no economy to speak of, indebted to the IMF and other creditors and completely dependent on foreign aid.  The government isn’t interested at all in the country’s development and neither are the country’s elite. They are bent upon converting every problem into a foreign conspiracy. Their reason why the country is in an economic, social and political mess after 6 decades of independence is because of US, India and Israel. I rarely find in Pakistani papers any news on economic and social reform. Everyone has an opinion on Afghanistan and Kashmir but no one has anything to say on the state of education in the country.

Where does Pakistan go from here?

 

A week in politics

One year ago in an unguarded moment I could have been caught saying that the British media didn’t have anything interesting to say. But all that has changed now and the knives are out. The media are pursuing their favourites, or in some cases even changing their favourites (Sun changing to Tories from New Labour and Guardian moving to Lib Dems from Labour) and criticising all the others who stand in the way of their chosen favourites.

My favourite newspaper (ok a weekly newsmagazine) in the world, The Economist, stands steadfast to its editorial stand – When in doubt turn right. How can it let go of an opportunity in a potential hung parliament to point towards the right. It ofcourse justifies it position saying, it supported the Socialists against Berlusconi. Ofcouse you bloody well support any donkey who stands against Silivio, unless you happen to be an underage model looking for an invite to his birthday party. I have to remind the Economist that they supported Bush Jr. not once but twice and even supported the Iraq war. Shame on me for continuing my subscription. The BBC ofcourse is neutral and frustratingly can not take an editorial stand. But apart from the BBC most papers, apart from the Independent and Economist to a certain extent, are biased in their reporting of the elections.

The politicians are no better. The country is facing a severe economic crisis, even though it is not one of the PIGS, and all the talk is about what they will save from the cuts. No one wants to talk about how they are going to save on spending and increase taxes to plug the deficit. The government doesn’t want to talk about it as it would reveal the mess it has got the country into and the opposition don’t want to scare away voters. All the voters have to say is as long as you protect what is important to me I don’t care what you do to the others. It’s ridiculous that there isn’t a serious enough debate happening on this issue. The other issue is ofcourse immigration. No politician seems to be able to stand up and say actually, most immigrants have been good for the economy and most of them come from the EU anyway.

More and more I see elections, I wonder why are politicians in politics. It is not for the money and I don’t buy the spin about wanting to make a difference to society or bring about change etc. They have to stand up and listen to immense amount of ignorance from their constituents and say yes to everything they ask for because if they say no then the vote will instead go to the candidate who says yes.  Then they foolishly leave their microphones on and their private conversations in which they let their steam off gets recorded on live television. I don’t know what is in it for politicians in a country like the UK which is increasingly getting entangled in the EU, its cross – Atlantic relationship will never see Cold War heights and is constantly having to punch above its weight in all issues international to make itself heard.

 

Vote hangover

There is something about a good election that gets me going. I love elections in so many different ways and in another life I want to be following elections around the world. Among the many ways to understand a country the best one is sit through an election process. I ofcourse assume that the country has an election and that it is a reasonably okayish process.

In an election the country’s past and future come out and everyone has to deal with them in the present. A candidate or a political party is usually judged on the basis of its past performance and on the basis of their plans for the future. This is when people are forced to deal with the current and future direction of their country and through it their lives. This is when all the political correctness goes outside the window and the media and the general public take sides and vehemently so. The still remaining politically correct lot call themselves the undecided lot. It becomes much easier to identify the political leanings of the newspapers when they give different spins to the same event.

I have been waiting for the British elections to arrive since I registered myself to vote two years ago and I have also been hoping that it is much closer than the polls seem to suggest even 6 months ago. In India, I am now so used to the coalition politics that it seems to be a waste of a parliamentary system to have two parties share power between them for the past couple of decades. Yes, it is the opinion of some people that a hung parliament is not good for the economy but I dont agree. I think two parties running a government will have a good vote share between them as compared to one party.

What’s also been interesting for me is the different parties opinion on various issues. Even though the 3 parties are on different parts of the political spectrum they seem to agree or partly agree on different issues. The Tories and Lib Dems are agreed on Labour’s economic mismanagement , although had they been in power they would have handled things differently and they have different ideas on solving the mess. The Tories and Labour agree more on the ‘special relationship’ with the US and the Lib Dem and Labour are more Europhiles than the Tories.

Another interesting part has been the personalities of the leaders. Cameron until 6 months ago had the swagger of the prince in waiting and all he had to do was to print posters with Gordon Brown’s face and put them up. The resulting revulsion would have resulted in the shoo in for the party. They did do that but it hasn’t quite worked and Labour has been giving back a little bit more. Nick Clegg of the Lib-Dems who until last month was charitably asked in interviews who would he support in case of a hung parliament has now begun to say more and more ‘if I would be Prime Minister..’. What changed it all was the television debate (the first in the history of British politics). One more debate to go this week and it is going to be on the economy.

I am still being politically correct and saying that I am undecided. I’ll vote Labour for its social ambitions, Lib Dems for foreign policy and the Tories (half heartedly) for running  a tight economy. That sounds like a hung parliament to me !